With all the rain we’ve gotten this year, you’ve likely noticed soft spots in your yard or maybe new drainage channels have carved themselves out along pathways. Water is a powerful force that shapes every part of our landscape. One of the places that it has a dramatic impact is along the shore. The forces of the waves and the tides are powerful. Add to that the scouring of ice in the winter, and it is easy to understand how the shoreline changes so much. It is when those changes begin to impact the infrastructure that we build along the coast that we stop to consider the value of a resilient barrier between land and sea. We rely upon ramps, bridges and roads that all abut the shoreline. If that shoreline changes, so does our ability to use this infrastructure for coastal access and transport. And this is just impacts to us landlubbers – it doesn’t consider the impacts on the natural world the lives along this boundary. 

Fortunately, nature has designed shorelines to absorb this impact. Salt marshes, for example, have thick layers of plant material that help to bind together the intertidal mud, creating a spongy absorbent mat. Sloped shores have vegetation with roots that grab onto earth and rocks and hold together coastal bluffs. Even sandy beaches have dune grasses whose roots help to stabilize the movement of the sands. All of these natural designs help to create a boundary that defines where the water ends and the land begins. These boundaries shift regularly in response to inputs like rain or storms, but sometimes these stresses are too much and the shorelines become unstable and start to break down.  

A new regional program is aiming to shore up some of these shorelines. And, the three Maine sites are in Brunswick. The Living Shorelines Program is a partnership between many different organizations and agencies from The Nature Conservancy (TNC) to the Casco Bay Estuary Partnership (CBEP) to the Maine Coastal Program to Brunswick’s town planning office, just to name a few. The range of the project stretches from Connecticut up to Maine. The idea is to test nature-based solutions to coastal erosion under a variety of types of sites. Brunswick’s sites include salt marsh sites at Wharton Point and the Maquoit Bay Conservation Area and a coastal bluff site at Lanes Island at the mouth of the Royal River. 

The solutions being tested are creative and novel. While traditionally, hardscape solutions like rip-rap (loose stones) and sea walls have been used, these often don’t fit well within the natural environment. They are not living shorelines, but rather man-made structures. And while they may hold back the water, they don’t serve the filtering functions of the natural shore that are important for water quality and nutrient levels. In addition, these structures just don’t look natural. The Living Shorelines program, by contrast, is testing materials like bags of crushed oyster shells and Coir logs made of coconut fibers shells packed in tubular netting. The hope is that over time these materials will be incorporated into the already existing shore and look more like a part of them than something apart from them.  

So what can we expect to see at the Brunswick sites? The installations will start this fall and there will be signs posted to explain what is happening. In addition, there will be opportunities to be involved both during the installation as well as during the monitoring of the sites. They will be sampled year-round over the next three years to see how they fare under different weather conditions including winter ice scouring. Members of Brunswick’s shellfish harvesting community will be able to earn conservation credits while helping out and students at the High School will also be involved in monitoring as a part of their applied marine science curriculum. They will focus on the Wharton Point site where the Outdoor Classroom is located and where they are trapping green crabs and seeding soft shell clams.   

One of the goals of this project is to discover workable solutions for both public and private shorelines, so if you are experiencing erosion at your property, this project may provide some new options in the future. In the meantime, keep an eye on the sites around Brunswick to learn more about the stabilization techniques being tested and for opportunities to be involved in monitoring their success.